Work, Jobs, and Worth

July 27, 2009

The Left
has long confused work, jobs, and worth. The Stimulus Package, the grand catastrophe, was intended to create and
preserve jobs which could make America poorer, not richer. A
century ago nearly everyone in America had a "job," and most
had jobs on farms. Men, women, and
children got up before sunrise. Women
slaved with iron stoves to make breakfast, while men and boys ate in
preparation for a long grueling day of generally boring work. Then the women, after doing all their chores,
prepared lunch, and at sundown, they made supper.

Everyone
had a job. Everyone engaged in
productive labor. And everyone looked
toward a hopeful future in which there would be less work that needed to be
done. We reached that goal after the Second
World War. Our nation had what we call
"full employment," but the jobs were engineers, oil field workers, men in
factories, clerks in stores and shops. We had people engaged in activities that produced goods and services
which people in the free market wanted to consume.

Government
can end "unemployment" tomorrow by paying people to sit home and watch
television, reporting in every fifteen minutes. Instead, it has done something else. The Left has "invented" whole areas of work which no one really wants,
except for those whose livelihood is connected to that industry. Consider, for moment, the civil rights
"industry." One reason why this noxious
doctrine is defended so fiercely is that hundreds of thousands of white collar
Americans work in federal, state, local, corporate, charitable, advocacy,
school, and academic bureaucracies supervising this meaningless work. No one wants the dubious "goods" these
functionaries provide, but who can tell them that they are no longer needed?

Anytime
government steps into our lives, it creates "jobs" which are the equivalent of
one company of men digging a whole and the other company filling it in. Why don't the media expose this grand
fraud? Because all of the major news
organizations, all the journalism schools, all the self-important pundits who
reside in Washington, along with all the countless armies of lobbyists need us
to believe that every single vital decision in our life is made in
Washington. So we have a whole army of
such odd creatures as "reporters covering the Supreme Court." Make-work in Washington, which itself makes
nothing more than hot air, is seen not as a problem, but rather the way to full
employment.

But what
do legislative staffers "produce"? Bills
which literally no one has read or analyzed or may never fully understand? What do presidential Czars produce, except an
additional layer of confusion regarding who is responsible for what policies in
our government? Yet no one in Washington
can imagine the farmers, oilmen, chefs, architects, nurses, car dealers, grade
school teachers, policemen, drug companies, surgeons, heating and air
conditioning businesses or all the other folks who actually produce good and
services we want could function without the unproductive employment of Washington
and the unproductive employment invented and shipped to us from Washington.

Building
a nuclear defense shield, if we really threw resources at it, could create a
lot of high paying jobs for scientists and engineers. That would produce something we could
use. Obama, in his stimulus, does not
want that sort of work. America , to him, is rich enough
already. He wants jobs that do nothing but
glorify the majesty of his Leftist doctrines. So do not look for Obama to grant each small business a big tax credit
for each additional employee hired after the stimulus was passed, although
small business is a mighty generator of real jobs. Look, instead, for Obama to have stimulus
funds trickle down the well worn lines of federal largesse through its many
pointless intermediaries until, at some point, the dregs are used to hire, say,
another community organizer in Chicago.

It is hard
to say whether the Left has simple contempt for productive genius or simply
fear of it, but it is very easy to see that creating
nominal "jobs" with no purpose seems noble and logical to those who have never
really created a good or a service in their lives.